Work - Life Balance

Women [and men] today are seeking greater flexibility in their jobs to balance more effectively their work and family responsibilities. Lack of such arrangements often forces women to opt out of pursuing their career goals. When they return to work, women find themselves at a disadvantage in terms of earnings, opportunities and promotions. Employers who adopt more flexibility in the workplace allow women and men to lead more productive and effective lives.

Catalyst

Contact

120 Wall Street
New York, NY 10005
Ph. 212-514-7600
Fx. 212-514-8470
http://www.catalyst.org
info@catalyst.org


Founded in 1962, Catalyst is the leading nonprofit membership organization expanding opportunities for women and business. With offices in the United States, Canada, Europe, and India, and more than 500 preeminent corporations as members, Catalyst is the trusted resource for research, information, and advice about women at work. Catalyst annually honors exemplary organizational initiatives that promote women's advancement with the Catalyst Award.

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Principal Staff

Ilene H. Lang, President & Chief Executive Officer
E-mail: ilenelang@catalyst.org

Nancy M. Carter, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, Research & Visiting Scholar, INSEAD
E-mail: ncarter@catalyst.org

Michael J. Chamberlain, Vice President, Brand Management & Events
Email: mchamberlain@catalyst.org

Jan Combopiano, Vice President & Chief Knowledge Officer
E-mail: jcombopiano@catalyst.org

Jennifer Daniel-Davidson, Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President, Finance, HR & Administration
E-mail: jdaniel@catalyst.org

Deborah Gillis, Senior Vice President, Membership & Global Operations
E-mail: dgillis@catalyst.org

Katherine Giscombe, Ph.D., Vice President, Diverse Women & Inclusion Research
E-mail: kgiscombe@catalyst.org

Eleanor Tabi Haller-Jorden, General Manager, Catalyst Europe AG
E-mail: ethaller-jorden@catalyst.org

Meryle Mahrer Kaplan, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, Advisory Services
E-mail: mkaplan@catalyst.org

Susan Nierenberg, Vice President, Global Marketing & Corporate Communications
E-mail: snierenberg@catalyst.org

Anabel Pérez, J.D., Senior Vice President, Development
E-mail: aperez@catalyst.org

Jeanine Prime, Ph.D., Vice President, Research
Email: jprime@catalyst.org

Emma Sabin, Vice President, Advisory Services, Partnerships
E-mail: esabin@catalyst.org

Deborah M. Soon, Senior Vice President, Strategy & Marketing
E-mail: dsoon@catalyst.org

Brande Stellings, J.D., Vice President, Advisory Services, Professional Services Practice
E-mail: bstellings@catalyst.org


Areas of Expertise:

Advancing Women's Leadership, Barriers & Challenges to Advancement, Business & Entrepreneurship, Barriers & Opportunities, Diversity & Inclusion, Glass Ceilings & Barriers, Disparities, Diversity & Inclusion, Successful Strategies & Programs, Mentoring, Women's Leadership, Women's, Gender & Feminist Studies, Work - Life Balance, Equality, Diversity & Inclusion

Member Experts:


Projects & Campaigns

Projects:

Leadership and Leadership Development

Women's Leadership Development: Catalyst has conducted national studies on women's leadership that have generated new insights into the progress women have made; the barriers they face; strategies to improve women's advancement; and issues specific to various industries and professions. Reports include, but are not limited to, the following: women scientists; census of corporate top officers and earners; census of female board directors; and women of color in corporate management.

Women in Corporate Leadership: A European Business Imperative. Catalyst and the Conference Board Europe released their first-ever joint study of women and men leading major corporations and firms in Europe. The research was featured at a two-day conference held on Tuesday, June 18th and Wednesday, June 19th. int hie ground-breaking study, Catalyst and the Conference Board Europe surveyed nearly 700 women and men in 20 European countries to determine the success factors and barriers for women in business and identify company initatives that advance women.

Leadership Careers in High Tech: Wired for Success. High tech companies make up an exciting, evolving, and still relatively new industry-one that has changed the way we look at work and careers and indeed all of our lives. This study provides young women in high tech with an easy-to-use road map that they can use to shape their own careers. Though initially intdended for women, this road map is useful for anyone interested in puruing a career in high tech.

The Next Generation: Today's Professionals, Tomorrow's Leaders. This study examines the generation of men and women born between 1964 and 1975 who are now employed in corporations and professional firms. We hear frequently from leaders in the business community how different this generation seems to be and yet how little is known about them. Our goal is to understand more clearly these women and men and their current attitudes toward work and the balance between work and personal life.

 

Science and Technology

Women in Science. Catalyst reports explore issues of recruitment and retention of women scientists in both academia and the scientific profession.

 

Women of Color -- Employment Issues

Women of Color in Corporate Management. Catalyst recently held a press breakfast devoted to the topic of women of color in corporate management to highlight the findings of a multi-year, multi-phase research project undertaken by Sheila Wellington. The project concentrates on opportunities and barriers for women of color in managerial roles.

Women of Color: Three Years Later. Now, more than ever, women of color are taking charge of their careers. Building on its groundbreaking research on women of color in corporate management, Catalyst tracked a core group of women of color managers over the past three years to ascertain their career movement and determine the factors behind it. Although current job and career satisfaction is high, these women report a decline in opportunities to advance to senior leadership and are less satisfied with their prospects for further advancement at their current employer.

 

Work and Family

Workplace Flexibility and Family Support. Catalyst also completes research on workplace flexibility and family support to highlight the work-family barriers faced by women and the support they need to maintain their professional advancement. Research has also been done on what strategies work most effectively to implement this support.

 

Reports & Resources

Business Career

Advancing Women Leaders: The Connection Between Women Board Directors and Women Corporate Officers (2008).     This research shows that the number of women on a company’s board of directors impacts the future of women in its senior leadership.

Advancing Women in Business: The Catalyst Guide to Best Practices from the Corporate Leaders (1998).

Women in Financial Services: The Word on the Street. This report on women in financial services shedes light on experiences, perceptions, and attitutudes of women in the industry and how they compare to those of male colleagues.

Women in Law: Making the Case. Catalyst's pioneering study of men's and women's career paths in the legal profession, Women in Law explores the obstascles to women's full integration into the legal profession. The report offers recommendations for legal employers on how to achieve strategic goals by retaining and developing women.

 

Child Care

Child Care Centers: Quality Indicators (1993). A guide for assessing a child care center by adult-child ratios, group sizes, staff qualifications, the work environment, cost, and utilization.

Child Care in Corporate America: Model Programs (1993). An analysis of corporate-sponsored child care, issues pertaining to quality, a discussion with experts, and six model programs.

 

Corporate Women -- Employment Issues 

Catalyst.  2010. Making Mentoring Work. Written by Sarah Dinolfo, and Julie S. Nugent.

http://www.catalyst.org/publication/365/making-mentoring-work

 

Catalyst. 2010. Making Mentoring Work—Business Case Framework . Writtent by Sarah Dinolfo,  and Julie S. Nugent.

http://www.catalyst.org/publication/366/making-mentoring-workbusiness-case-framework

 

Catalyst. 2010. Making Mentoring Work—Sample Mentoring Scorecard. Written by Sarah Dinolfo, and Julie S. Nugent.

 http://www.catalyst.org/publication/369/making-mentoring-worksample-mentoring-scorecard

 

Catalyst. 2010. Making Mentoring Work—Sample Mentor and Mentee Career Development Action Plan. Written by Sarah Dinolfo, and Julie S. Nugent.

http://www.catalyst.org/publication/368/making-mentoring-worksample-mentor-and-mentee-career-development-action-plan

 

Catalyst. 2010. Making Mentoring Work—Formal Mentoring ROI Spreadsheet Tool. Written by  Sarah Dinolfo, and Julie S. Nugent.

http://www.catalyst.org/publication/367/making-mentoring-workformal-mentoring-roi-spreadsheet-tool

 

Catalyst 2009. 2009 Catalyst Census: Fortune 500 Women Board Directors. Writtent by Heather Foust-Cummings and Emily Pomeroy.

http://www.catalyst.org/publication/345/2009-catalyst-member-benchmarking-report

 

Cracking the Glass Ceiling: Strategies for Success (1999). Case studies on how major corporations remove glass ceiling barriers.

Catalyst Census of Women Directors of the Fortune 500 (1998). Published annually since 1993, it lists the women who serve on Fortune 500 boards and how many women are on each company's board.

Catalyst Census of Women Corporate Officers and Top Earners (1998). An annual census showing how women rank among the highest paid executives, which companies and industries have the most female officers, and which states have the highest concentration of women at the top.

Closing the Gap: Women's Advancement in Corporate and Professional Canada (1998). Based on a survey of more than 400 high-level women and nearly 200 chief executives in Canada's largest corporations and professional firms, this study includes the varying perspectives of senior women and chief executives on what holds women back from the top.

Women in Corporate Leadership: Progress and Prospects (1996). A survey of top women managers offering testimony from the women who have made it, as well as the views of Fortune 1000 CEOs.

Knowing the Territory: Women in Sales (1995). Sales representatives, human resources professionals, and sales managers from major American companies discuss what sales organizations can do to attract, retain, and advance women.

The CEO View: Women on Corporate Boards (1995). America's Fortune 1000 CEOs discuss what they expect from female directors and offer insight into the written and unwritten criteria for board nomination.

Women on Corporate Boards: The Challenge of Change (1993). A report about female directors' backgrounds, their expectations of and experience on corporate boards, their feelings about advocacy for women's issues, and the ways in which they relate to female employees of companies on whose boards they serve.

Mentoring: A Guide to Corporate Programs and Practices (1993). A report describing how to identify and advance high-potential women, recruit and train new employees, and avoid common problems.

Creating Successful Mentoring Programs: A Catalyst Guide. This guide teaches you how to identify and advance high-potential women, recruit and train new employees, and avoid common pitfalls of formal mentoring programs. This recently updated report takes you step-by-step through implementing a formal mentoring program.

Women in Corporate Management: Model Programs for Development and Mobility (1991). A report on 17 Fortune 500 companies with exemplary programs for women and why these initiatives are successful.

Creating Women's Networks: A How-To Guide for Women and Companies. A guide to starting and sustaining women's workplace networks based on Catalyst's work.

On The Line: Women's Career Advancement. A report outlining barriers women face and recommending strategies for overcoming them, including examples of America's newest and most creative policies for helping women advance.

Entrepreneurship

Women Entrepreneurs: Why Companies Lose Female Talent and What They Can Do About It (1998). A joint project with the National Foundation for Women Business Owners and The Committee of 200, it discusses the fact that women are starting new businesses at twice the rate of men.


 

Feminist Thought and Scholarship

The Catalyst Award: Setting the Standard for Women's Advancement. Details Catalyst Award winning initiatives from 1987 to 1997.

 

Science and Technology

Women in Engineering: An Untapped Resource (1992). Recommendations of what companies can do to attract, retain, and advance women engineers, including initiatives that address barriers, perceptions of male counterparts, and job satisfaction.

Women Scientists in Industry: A Winning Formula for Companies. A study identifying factors in the corporate culture that contribute to or impede the career advancement of women scientists.


 

Women of Color -- Corporate Women

Catalyst. 2009. Women of Color in U.S. Law Firms - Women of Color in Professional Services Series. Written by Deepali Bagati.

http://www.catalyst.org/publication/344/women-of-color-in-us-law-firmswomen-of-color-in-professional-services-series

Women of Color in Corporate Management: Opportunities and Barriers (1999). The third part of the study that looks at women of color's expectations, experiences, and perceptions of corporate culture and how they affect the women's job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and intent to stay with the company.

Women of Color in Corporate Management: Dynamics of Career Advancement (1998). A discussion of what African-American, Asian-American, and Latina women perceive as barriers to advancement in corporate America. Read Catalyst's recommendations on what companies can do to retain and advance this important segment of their talent pool.

Women of Color in Corporate Management: A Statistical Picture (1997). A combination of census data and previously unpublished information from Catalyst's Women in Corporate Leadership study presents a demographic overview of women managers of color.

 

Work and Family

Catalyst. 2008. Making Change-Beyond Flexibility: Work-Life Effectiveness as an Organizational Tool for High Performance. Written by Lisa D'Annolfo Levey, Aimee Horowitz, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan. 

http://www.catalyst.org/publication/318/making-changebeyond-flexibility-creating-champions-for-work-life-effectiveness-spanish-version

Two Careers, One Marriage: Making It Work in the Workplace (1998). Based on the responses of almost 1,000 dual-career earners and aimed at employers, this study describes the issues that mean the most to these couples.

A New Approach to Flexibility: Managing the Work/Time Equation (1997). An assessment of flexible work arrangements describes strategies and solutions.

Making Work Flexible: Policy to Practice (1996). A guide on helping organizations and managers implement and manage flexible work arrangements in corporations and professional firms.

Flexible Work Arrangements II: Succeeding with Part-Time Options (1993). Findings from the first longitudinal study of flexible work arrangements and their effect on employees' career growth.

The Corporate Guide to Parental Leaves (1992). A manual to help employers plan or update a cost-effective parental leave policy, created before the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 went into effect.

 

Weekly Blog:

www.catalyst.org/etc/wordpress/

 

 

Center News

Opportunities, Grants & Fellowships

Membership Benefits:

Catalyst members join a rich global community of organizations striving to develop and improve ways to attract, retain, and advance women in the workplace. Three benefit packages—Supporter, Research Partner, and Premium Supporter (Europe only)—are offered to accommodate member priorities.

Supporter

  • Online access to members-only knowledge products, designated by a circled M, including:
    • Tools—action-oriented materials enabling information to be turned into ready-to-implement programs for making change.
    • Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Practices—detailed descriptions of effective organizational initiatives to advance women into leadership.
    • Eye on D&I—a weekly global news roundup.
  • Invitation to participate in Catalyst member benchmarking, allowing you to compare your workforce statistics to competitors' and to Catalyst Award winners.
  • Access to Catalyst’s Information Center and its professional librarians, as well as to Catalyst issue specialists.
  • Invitation to participate in virtual and in-person events.
  • Your organization's name on the Catalyst website, in the Catalyst Annual Report, and in the Catalyst Awards Dinner Program.
  • Link to the Catalyst website from your organization's intranet.
  • A Catalyst Member Liaison to pair Catalyst resources to your needs.
  • Special rates for engaging Catalyst researchers, consultants, and executives through the Speakers Bureau.
  • Access to Catalyst's Corporate Board Services, a referral and assessment program.
  • Strategic consulting services through Catalyst's Advisory Services (fee-for-service).
  • Coming in 2010! The Catalyst Member Activities Planner (MAP) for tracking new research and virtual and in-person events.

Research Partner

  • All Supporter benefits.
  • Sponsorship recognition in all Catalyst research reports produced in the calendar year.
  • A registration-fee discount of $100, per person, for up to five people, at the Catalyst Awards Conference.
  • Participation in Catalyst-wide, invitation-only events.
  • Complimentary Catalyst Speakers Bureau engagement.

Premium Supporter (Europe)

  • All Supporter benefits.
  • Strategic Focused Intervention (SFI), real-time strategic guidance from a Catalyst expert, up to 14 hours in a calendar year.
  • Participation in Catalyst-wide, invitation-only events.

 


Multimedia

Video

Photos

Audio


FAST FACT: Changing Things Up—Gender Dynamics at Work and at Home

April 3, 2009 posted by Kyla Bender-Baird The Families and Work Institute  recently released a fascinating report on the changing gender dynamics in the home and workplace.  What they found is quite exciting:


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Love in the Time of Layoff: Her Expendable Career

April 1, 2009 posted by Deborah Siegel Deborah Siegel is the author of Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, creator of the group blog Girl w/Pen and a long-time friend of the Council.  The following was originally posted on Recession Wire as Deborah's latest installment of her weekly column, Love in the Time of Layoff. Those who read this column know that I’ve been writing very personally about how the downturn has affected my relationship. In all honesty, I’m starting to fear that by focusing on what’s happening inside relationships, we may be losing sight of larger contexts—what could and should be happening in the structures that govern our lives. The personal is political, after all! Whoever invented the notion that a wife who earns less than her husband has a career that is, by definition, “expendable”? The ubiquity of this sentence—“she has an expendable career”—was brought home to me once again when I read Diane Clehane’s “Recession Marriage Wars” in yesterday’s Daily Beast. Clehane poignantly shares her frustration that for her, and for many working mothers she knows, “The recession means wives are under pressure from their husbands who tell them a sitter is now a luxury they can’t afford.” These are working mothers, mind you—women who have defined themselves by their careers for most of their lives and who know that being a good mom and having a great career are not mutually exclusive. As someone with big hopes of starting a family, and as a feminist, I’m thinking government-funded or employer-subsidized childcare is sounding like a pretty darn good idea right about now.


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ECONOMIC STIMULUS FORUM: Round-Up

March 2, 2009 posted by admin 

Photo Cred: Matt Collins via Society and PoliticsIt is undeniable that we are facing tough economic times.  In January, the unemployment rate registered 7.6% with 11.6 million people lacking jobs.  An additional 7.8 million people are deemed underemployed, that is, working part-time because they cannot find full-time jobs.  And prospects are dimming. According to the Economic Policy Institute , finding a job today is twice as hard as it was when the recession started a year ago.  With the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act [ARRA], however, there is some room for hope. Many of our network members are doing excellent work on the stimulus plan.  The Ms. Foundation held a conference call to discuss the legislative package and how to secure more jobs for women.  The National Women’s Law Center is analyzing the stimulus process and how it affects women and families. Check out their latest breakdown.   In examining the bill, we were particularly struck with provisions regarding small businesses, healthcare, education and, especially, job creation.  Naturally, we had some questions, for example, what other areas are critical for stimulating growth and supporting women and girls, their families and communities? To find the answers, we turned to our experts:


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ECONOMIC STIMULUS FORUM: Center for American Progress’ Heather Boushey—Let’s Get People Back to Work!

February 27, 2009 posted by admin The best thing we can do for women and their families is to get people back to work. We’ve seen 3.6 million jobs disappear over the past year and millions more have seen their hours cut back. The recession is turning out to be deeper and more protracted than many had predicted even a few months ago. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was a down payment on creating jobs in the months to come and laying the foundation for long-term economic growth. The Council of Economic Advisors estimates that the recovery package will save or create 3.5 million jobs and that about four in ten of these jobs will go to women workers. In particular, the recovery package will help states avoid some cutbacks, which takes some women’s jobs out of jeopardy since women make up the majority of state and local government workers. But, most importantly, the recovery package will get the economy back on track, which benefits all kinds of families. The recession – so far – is leading to higher unemployment among men than women: as of December 2008, the latest data available by gender, men account for four out of every five jobs lost since the recession began in December 2007. This means that in millions of U.S. households, it is a woman who is supporting the family. This means that families will have to rely increasingly on women’s earnings, which are typically lower than men’s and are less likely to come with health insurance. Now is the time to insist that every woman earns a fair day’s pay. 


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